PMH To Get $50,000.00 In Grant Money Soon

Marlinton, WV – Pocahontas Memorial Hospital Interim CEO Barbara Lay had good news for the hospital Board of Trustees during their Octorber meeting – the hospital will soon receive some much needed funding from a couple of grants. According to Lay, the first is from the West Virginia Rural Health Systems Program and also includes a loan.

“We did receive the $50,000.00 crisis grant ” says Lay. “They are processing the $50,000.00 loan; they’ve never actually done a loan, so she had to develop the document. But it was prime [rate]; I asked her is she could go ahead and expedite the grant.”

Lays says the grant portion will be used to pay the hospitals bills. She says the hospital will also be getting grant money for the radiology department.

“Cheryl King, our Director/Supervisor of Radiology found a grant opportunity for education and equipment and she has submitted that” says Lay.

That grant is for $7500.00. Lay also asked the board for permission to apply for two other grants. One is for $10,000.00 for Dr. Jarrett. Sara Casto says the money is to help Dr. Jarrett pay back student loans.

“We got $10,000.00 and then the hospital had to match $10,000.00” says Casto “but we did an agreement with Dr. Jarrett where his per visit pay was added towards that matching amount, so we didn’t actually pay out $10,000.00.”

The second grant for $9500.00 is for threat preparedness. Lay says Bill Ellis of the West Virginia Hospital Association is working to get an equal share of the funds available in this region of the state that includes both PMH and the Charleston Area Medical Center.

“In this region the money is divided by the number of beds each hospital has” says Lay. “For example, CAMC may get $190,000.00 and [PMH] will get $9500.00. So he’s going to advocate very strongly that this region look at dividing it by hospital so that the smaller hospitals can have more funds to help be prepared for threat preparedness.”

The board approved applying for both grants. In other business, Lay told the board she would like the hospital to develop an outreach program for suicide prevention. She says per capita, Pocahontas County is currently second in the state for suicides. She also asked the board to give her feedback on what they see as administration priorities.

“If you would write down the number one thing you would like to see accomplished in the next 30 days” she says, “and then the number one thing number one thing you’d like to see accomplished in the next year. At our training this is one of the things that the speaker said we really need to do so that we as administration are going in the direction that you want us to.”

Lay says she will also put together a committee to work on the hospitals business plan. She hopes to have that ready for presentation at the next board meeting on November 18th.